Yeah man, I've kind of assigned myself to the task of creating some tutorials. Anything in particular you'd like to see in the near future?

I used to own that card. I had shared video mem as a motherboard feature eating into my then-awesome 128 megs of ram. Check your bios to see if this may be part of the problem.

I'd have to clean it up and get some of those missing pieces cleared up first, but yeah I will consider posting that and more on the wiki.

If I may make a second attempt to steer you back on topic, Popfly is written in something completely new. Just as Construct and MMF differ greatly in the engines that drive them, we may yet find some benefit to Silverlight we could not foresee.. But how could we do that unless somebody out there gave it a try? It also makes your copy/paste argument put you in a negative light. This is essentially the same thing uninformed Clickteam forumgoers accuse Construct of. Same with bugginess. It's harder to see the relation between Construct and any major operating system because of the sheer scale, but judging just by this forum the bugginess is the same pound for pound. It's all relative, but perhaps it just feels better when one can actively participate in the development.

Appreciate this "Popfly" for what it is, and leave your hate rants for a time when they are more useful - as in hostile company takeovers.

For all anyone knows and in all likelihood this Popfly thing was probably created by a team of less than ten people. "OMG MICROSOFT MADE THIS" doesn't quite mean the same thing every time the subject is brought up.

Opensourceophiles often bring up the "OMG MICROSOFT STOLE IT" defense, which to me seems incredibly hypocritical. For being so open to the free exchange of ideas, you sure are deathly frightened of any market competition. Maybe your open-source is freeware too, but it still becomes part of the market. In the event that a large company wishes to entertain the same idea while providing for all the regulations in place to help ensure product worth (professional technical suport, development cycles and the like) it is taking the gamble that they can make the better product. It's all about where the consumers choose to align themselves - the corporation requires a userbase for development costs, and open source projects require a userbase to voluntarily fill the service gaps inherent with the free model. Both are prone to failure without this vital user base, just as they easily stagnate without innovating competition.

This is why I can't stand fanaticism from either side of this argument. It all boils down to economics. And for the topic at hand, this is Microsoft displaying the early results of their latest work heading into the next generation. Does it fit our needs? No. Is Microsoft evil for taking an existing idea and applying it to a new media? No. When you someday invent the next globe-changing thing, I'm sure you'll be happy to have had the work of those before you as inspiration. And that day you'll perhaps say, "Hmm, the Captain had a point all along" as you swivel in your big, scary, evil (but very comfy) corporate office chair to watch your product make you richer by the minute.

Construct's animation system works as so:

ANIMATION_NAME

--ANGLE (n degrees of 360)

----Animation frames

++[sub animations]

You do not need sub animations for each angle. Sub animations are to my knowledge, and Ashley may elaborate later, for both organizational and conditional purposes much like sub events. Neither are necessary. The conditional aspect is that sub-anything relies on its parent being true or activated.

The thing about Animation Names you read has to do with the "Animation is playing" event sheet condition not working at the time of this writing. This can be resolved with private variables, but is often unnecessary anyway.

For 2D platformers and similar camera styles, the "Auto Mirror" setting within your sprite settings (when it's selected, appear to the left of the screen by default) will provide the left/right corrections as needed. You would only need to define either angle 0 (right) or 180 (left). This setting, like all similar settings, pertains to your animations globally. For example, switching between animations will always honor the horizontal movement of the sprite.

Top-down views are different. For an Asteroids-type game, set your Rotation Variable to "N Angles" and define how many steps it may take, up to 360. You need only create one angle of any given animation and Construct will rotate it for you.

For an on-rails shooter, like Gradius or Ikaruga, you may wish to lock your animation angle regardless of movement. For this, use "No Rotation."

To answer your last question more succinctly, it sounds like you should use settings common to a platformer with "Auto Mirror" on and no rotation. After loading the keyboard/mouse object into your layout and setting a Behavior for your sprite you should quickly see that it is working largely the way you would expect.

One final note and something that differs greatly from Multimedia Fusion, at this stage in development animation frame numbers are carried over between animations. I think this is cool, but there is no way to turn it off. When switching to an animation that is not analogous to the previous one, be sure you add the command "Set animation frame to ##" in your events.

I hope this gets you started and helps you avoid the major undocumented pitfalls. If you encounter any trouble, feel free to upload your .cap file for us to look at.

AAAAaaaaannnnnd, there. Now that all the thoughtful conversation has ended, thus commences the obligatory hateful and uninformed anti-Microsoft rhetoric.

No, why do you ask?

Rick Astley will never give you up. Just sayin'.

I agree. It's essentially a glorified tech demo. A cool concept, but I'll stick to having a stand-alone installation, thanks. These baby steps toward viable in-browser applications fascinate me, though.

I don't know why, maybe they've made it too simple or something, but I'm having a hard time putting any scripting together. Most of the hardcore programmers I knew at college always seemed to be as efficient as humanly possible (and got off on competing with peers as who's code was the most), but Popfly seems to have gone in the opposite direction. Like they've convoluted all the simplest concepts with a many metaphors as possible.

It's not bad for what it is. It's essentially the infantile Web 3.0. It's just not at the level people on this forum would expect of it, is all.

Nothing said has been dumb. As you gain experience, you start learning tricks that just sorta "click." That little bit of math that makes the size smoothly transition? Learned that in high school. The "additive value rotation" I learned from Clickteam software (don't know why I didn't mention this method when we had that "change button color" thread). The use of layers to create a composite sprite is brand new, and something I learned offhand from one of Ashley's tutorials.

When trying to do something outside the bounds of current objects and functions, it's not a 100% creative process. You don't dive in with a box of Wheaties and hope the answers just come to you. Most of your problem solving will likely be in a reverse order, starting with the idea of what you want something to do or look like in the end. Like this: I want a circle object with these features. How can I make the circle? How can I then give it a border? Maintaining that border, how can I animate it using only the math I understand? How can I make it as expandable as possible?

Once you have your plan, then it's a matter of steps. From the bottom of your list on upward, you build your program until it resembles the thesis at the top of your list.

This has been a longer reply than I intended. I think I've made my point, so I'll leave you to decide whether or not I'm full of myself.

If it's event intensive, that's not saying much. Each and every one of the behaviors (movements, what are they called now?) is surely incredibly complex with laid out event-wise.

That's why you might consider making this its own event sheet. There is little else more elegant than:

Include event sheet: "Circle Object Behavior"